Author: ThirdCat

Tidy person

A few months ago I was reflecting on myself as a minimalist and Adrian guffawed. A guffaw is the kind of thing you just intuitively know what it is even though it’s the kind of thing you only ever see written down but never hear. I was so shocked by this, because although I would say I often have a lot of things spilling all around the house, I do like to think that I live in an orderly kind of way.

Feeling insulted by his guffaw, I repeated my claims of minimalism to my children, one of them looked at my in a perplexed way, ‘What do you mean?’ and the other was outright rude, ‘That’s ridiculous.’

Determined to demonstrate my truth, I embarked on this path of tidiness, (re)declaring myself to be a tidy person. This has been made a lot easier this week by the extreme clean I did on my workspace, and in particular by the box labelled ‘catalogues and pamphlets’. There is somewhere to put all of the random little things that gather like the pointy end of a whirlpool on the table in the kitchen.

One thing I have noticed about being a tidy person is that I’m spending a lot of time walking around the house carrying things from one place to another. The other thing I’ve noticed is that the more time I spend tidying, the more often I am looking around the house and thinking, ‘This isn’t a tidy house.’

While the general sense of tidiness has improved, there is a new sense of chaos as we have brought all of the Christmas boxes out and they are in the middle of the floor just where you walk in. It’s hard to say it’s a tidy space when we all have to walk around a big pile of things.

In honour of being a tidy person, yesterday I went to Officeworks to buy myself a small 2024 diary for my handbag, a large wall calendar, a display binder and manila inserts for the display binder. When I left Officeworks I had those four things and nothing more. That is definitely the actions of a tidy person.

Back at home, I saw the devastation of my new Christmas glasses, smashed into a million pieces. Somehow this is all tied into my decisions made at Officeworks, and it seemed to symbolise something about Christmas. A sign that I need to take care, and not get sucked into the vortex of Christmas consumerism. Three broke, I still have three, and last night I very much enjoyed a glass of fiano, my fingers wrapped awkwardly around the Christmas tree stem.

When I woke up this morning I gave thought to the idea that I might cancel my booking for my gym class. But I kept it, and now it’s time to leave if I want to make it in time. I am definitely a person who gets places on time. No one can argue with that.

Expected high of forty

I went for a quick early run. By ‘quick’ I mean that I went for a short time not that my running style was fast. Half past seven and it was already hot. I hadn’t had a coffee because I wanted to get out before it got too hot. So I was struggling right from the beginning, and went only to the surf club and back. I’ll get t the gym later today to make it a full day’s workout.

Already the beach was packed with adults, children and dogs, the tables at the surf club coffee shop were full. And already it was warmer than is optimal for me. I’ve been thinking lately that I miss living closer to the city, getting on the tram and being there in more or less no time at all. But when I got out of the car yesterday and could smell the sea in the air, and this morning as I joined the throngs at the beach, I remembered what it is I love about living here. Every single day I breathe in the sea.

The boys are on the verge of finishing exams. I will miss the focused energy that they have brought to the house. They are so much more committed to their learning than I ever was. Not that their focus has really rubbed off on me of course. I continue to faff about, and last night realised that it’s been two weeks since I did my reading and I’ve done little to no new writing since then.

Yesterday I did manage to finish another page of my new website, but of course that’s a displacement activity from new writing. However, there were two other wins. I put all my clothes away, and I did not take my ipad to bed so I went to sleep without watching endless episodes of Sister Wives. Oh, there was a third win: switched the quilt cover to the lighter one, so went to bed in the deliciousness and lightness of new season bedding.

Nine o’clock which is the time I told myself I’d get started on new writing, so I’d best be off.

What happened when the art teacher was away

Yesterday’s drawing class was hard. All the drawing classes have been hard so that’s a redundant statement. But this one was hard for a new reason: our teacher was away, so we had a different teacher. This different teacher hadn’t been briefed on my status as Least Talented Person ever to enter art school, so I had to spend the whole lesson living with the low-level anxiety of slowly being revealed as the Least Talented Person ever to enter art school.

I hadn’t realised how comfortable I’d grown with my teacher, knowing that she knows I’m hopeless, but she also knows what I will be able to achieve, and kind of just gets me to do the best I can within the limits of what I’ll be able to do. The relief teacher didn’t know this and was pushing me to make things bigger, to finish way more than I’d be able to finish, to try way more than I would have time to try. This is important in a teacher, but not when the student is me.

It took me all the way back to my first few weeks. The sense of floundering at my easel. The physical sensations of flustering, heart racing, skin prickling, overheating. The single question turning over and over in my mind: What the fk am I doing enrolled in a visual arts course? No, but really, what the fk. I think I actually am the only person who has ever enrolled not because I have always enjoyed drawing, but because I’ve always not enjoyed it.

I’m trying to understand what it is about my brain that keeps making me start on things for which I have no natural talent instead of taking the things I am good at and focusing on getting better at them.

At the end of the day I had something that looked like an apple, a pomegranate and a pear. The colours weren’t anything like they had been on the originals, but they were lovely colours nonetheless. I had a teapot that looked like it could be finished into a teapot. And I had a background that looked like a big scribbled mess.

It did crystallise my thinking around what I’m going to do next semester. I’ll have to take time off. Apart from anything else, I won’t be able to keep up with the drawing while I’ve got fringe shows going on. But more than that, I need a bit of time to consolidate everything I’ve learned. The main thing I’ve learned is how to go about getting the things that I see onto the page. How to draw the lines and the angles and the distances between things. This is, in fact, amazing to me. Every week, the homework has made more and more sense and been more and more successful. I have, in that sense, learnt to draw. However, it still takes me a very, very long time to work out exactly what it is that I am seeing in order to get it onto the page, and this has a huge impact on how things go in class. I can’t really spend another semester being quite this hopeless.

That means I’ve got just one more class to go, and fingers crossed my regular teacher will be there and I will only have to cope with the knowledge that I’m hopeless not the added stress of having this fact discovered by a new teacher.

Before the doing is always the sorting

The drawing subject I’ve been studying has naturally resulted in the accumulation of a whole bunch of new things. It has also meant that I’ve finally found a use for some things that I’ve bought in the pass without having any idea how to use them (about three different tins of graphite pencils for example). Because they were new things (or old things but finally being used), they didn’t really have a proper home and hadn’t been integrated into my little study. This meant that they were spread either all around the living room or piled up on the floor in my study–both of these things being counterproductive if you’re trying to create a calm working environment.

It was also growing super inefficient, and I was spending way too much time looking for things. I don’t enjoy looking for things, and I find it extremely frustrating, and this leads me to get twitchy, then annoyed, then grumpy.

I spent all of yesterday doing (yet another) sort and organise of my working space. It’s got a bit of a different purpose this time as I try to get all of my sewing and embroidery stuff into the little space that we made by getting an extra wall put in. Which has meant that what is left in this space is only the writing things, the folders and the notebooks. (It was kind of revealing as I put all of the notebooks into one square of the kallax). I made a few archive boxes for things like catalogues and postcards and other kinds of categories that make complete sense to me but would be laughable to anyone else. And for now I’ve got a place for everything, which means that I can put anything I pick up in a place where I will find it quickly and easily.

Today I have done (yet another) big push on sorting out my admin to-do list, including getting on top of some glitchy email thing. One of my email addresses isn’t working properly–well I guess it’s working, I haven’t set it up properly but it amounts to the same thing. So today I sat at my desk determined to work through everything and find all of the lost emails.

Combine all this with the fact that last week I caught up on my oustanding art homework, and I have that sense of righteous calm. Which is a good foundation for the large amount of creative work that I want to get finished over the next couple of months. At the same time, of course now that I’ve started on another round of sorting and organising I’m a bit seduced by other opportunities for sorting, of which there are still (always) many. But I am reminding myself that ultimately creative work is more rewarding than sorting, especially if that creative work is built on the back of a bunch of sorting.

Talk tomorrow (or the day after or maybe even next week).

Night one of two

My name shifted up the waitlist and I got a seat at the Dog Eared Readings last night. With Shannon Burns in conversation with J.M. Coetzee it was never going to be anything except extraordinary. Naturally, it left me with that strange dissonance I always experience after such events. On the on hand, exhilaration from being witness to such depth of thought and thinking. On the other, despair. What’s the point of living a writing life when you know you are never going to achieve that level not only of perception but of connection with your readers and audience.

It also reminded me how entrenched I am on the fringes of everything, a result partly of my level of (okay, but not outstanding) talent, partly of being a little bit in a lot of things but not fully immersed in any, partly of being a little bit lazy and not doing enough work, partly of being too shy etceterarrgghhh. Most of the time I’m not only reconciled to my life on the fringes of our arts scenes, but leaning into it. Every now and then, however, I can’t help wishing I were slightly more successful.

No time for self-pity though, because I’m reading an extract of my new show at the SA Playwrights Theatre staged readings this evening and the deadline is, as always, an excellent distraction. I know telling you that I’m reading seems to contradict my previously discussed status of being on the fringe, but the rest of the lineup is a solid range of talent invited to be in curated programs and a list of prizes and none of them will know my work at all.

I do know this all sounds angsty and self-pitying, but it honestly isn’t. Like I say, I’m mostly at peace with who I am and where I’ve ended up. But it’s useful to leave myself little reminders when this feeling sneaks in, so that next time I feel it, I can look back over things, think, ‘oh, that’s right, this again,’ and move on.

What I especially loved about last night was the discussion of class. My own notions of class are ridiculously outdated I know. My sense of connection to my working class background is, by now, highly romanticised. My children would have absolutely no sense of what it means to feel working class. I’m not sure what to do with that knowledge, especially in the context of the referendum result.

I’m going to have leave this here as a placeholder because it’s 2.30 which is the time I promised myself I’d get back to work. But it’s something I’d like to explore in more depth, if I can work out where to start.

Confirmation bias

After writing about him only two days ago and his influence on my return to my blogging space, I am–at this very minute–listening to Cory Doctorrow talking about his new book on Radio National. Not surprisingly, he sounds exactly like the kind of person you want to listen to. Calm and smart and a little bit funny.

I spent all of yesterday at my desk, moving between this blog, my substack page, my new website, and of course the script that I’m reading from tomorrow night. I also had a bunch of notebooks and journals open in front of me. It sounds like distraction hell, but actually it’s helping me to get all of my many thoughts out of my head and down on the page in a reasonably orderly way. Kind of like when you’re doing a clean-out or moving house or organising the cupboards and you have a bunch of tubs or buckets or boxes and you go through everything one-by-one and throw each thing into whichever bucket they fit and at the end of the day you’ve got a bunch of tubs or buckets or boxes with a group of more-or-less cohesive things.

It was a really rewarding day. Messy, but not overwhelming. And I can see a way forward to getting a bunch of things finished over the next year or so. It’s frustrating of course because its nothing I didn’t already know, and what have I been doing with my time, and I should have finished much more than I have over the years. But here we are and I’m feeling surprising hopeful about how things are going to go over the next little while. (Future me is going to have a good laugh about this one, eh?).

Back to work.

Getting it done. Early or late?

I’m not sure of the best time to write if I want to get a blog post written every day. Doing it in the morning feels like it’s not a good use of the good writing energy that a morning brings (I should be doing the real writing), but if I wait until the evening then I’m all out of writing energy and wanting to do something like my knitting or embroidery.

So it’s the morning. I’ve done a quick bit of morning pages, focused on the script of Stitches, because I’ve got the staged readings on Thursday night and it would be good to have something that makes a bit more sense than what I currently have. And now I’m at my desk, with half an hour to go before my day gets swamped by a bunch of work things that need doing.

Adrian booked us a bunch of things for the Adelaide Film Festival over the weekend. It felt invigorating getting to the Capri early on a Thursday and Friday evening, be in a crowd of people all enjoying what they’re watching, then skip over to Good Gilbert for a glass of wine and a bit of food. I don’t know whether it felt good because there’s still a bit of post-covid release; or whether it’s my renewed commitment to creative and enriching life; or maybe the sense of moving into a new stage of life with certain freedoms now that children are living their own autonomous and independent lives. Maybe it’s some combination of them all. Or maybe it was just a lovely weekend. We saw Poor Things on Thursday night, and Emma Stone was extraordinary. Friday was The Persian Version which was less cinematic than Poor Things, and perhaps not as joyous as promised in the blurbs, but nonetheless excellent (I should be a movie reviewer with such insightful commentary).

Had a performance of An Evening with the Vegetarian Librarian down at the Victor Harbor library on Saturday afternoon, and it was excellent fun. I do love that script. Most of it is very silly indeed, but of all my scripts it’s the most fun to perform. And it’s weird that even though I wrote it, the more I perform it the more that I find things in there I never knew were there, and the more I think, ‘okay, that’s an amazing line’ (if I do say so myself).

Then went to see the 80s synth and strings show by Follow That Car. Enormous, joyous fun, wearing my sparkly boots and a little bit of dancing. Would go again, ten out of ten for a night of pure escapism. Adrian was sitting next to the father of the lead singer who said, ‘I don’t know why he’s the one with a band, his sister’s the best singer in the family, and I’m the second best.’ But he said it with the kind of quiet pride that makes you hope your own kids know how quietly proud you are of them.

Sunday we went to Speedway which was over at the Piccadilly. It was around 3pm when we came out and there weren’t too many post-film food options, so we ended up at the bakery. That’s only our second visit and I was doing a terrible job of making a decision and ended up with a pasty and a sausage roll intending to take the sausage roll home, but ate most of it there. It made me think that I might need to include some more about (in)decisiveness in my show.

Home then and knitting on the couch until it was time to go and collect children from a music festival in McLaren Vale. Then went to bed knowing that when I woke up it would be Monday.

Back to work now.

Sunday morning

Home again

Even after my solemn vow to never neglect it again, I have this weekend rediscovered my blog after apparently forgetting it for ten months. Time after time it is this simple format that proves itself to be the most constant companion of my online life. After a facebook thread the other–a rare wave of discussion in a sea of nothing much–I was reminded of this article in Wired by Corey Doctorrow (my god, that man’s brain) on the enshitiffaction of tiktok (and encompassing pretty much every social media platform). At the same time, I’ve been back on the new writing trail. This always leads to me trawling through the scraps of every word I’ve committed to every space over the last year. A desperate search for the spark of something which might lead to something more substantial which might, eventually, add up to a fully-formed piece. With the enshitiffaction of facebook and insta, and the general patchiness of my substack newsletter there is less to trawl through than ever before. (And of course the fact that after five shows, I have already mined many of the seams–but this makes the scraps and sparks even more valuable).

I had thought that getting a bit more regular with my newsletter might help. But newsletters are only superficially like blogs. Newsletters aren’t the place for the meandering whimsy of nothing in particular that blogs have always allowed. As I started on my newsletter on Friday morning, filling it with this and that of nothing much including (but not limited to a visit to the chemist to buy a replacement cleanser), I was forced to ask, ‘Who wants this landing in their inbox really?’

The chemist story was the kind of thing that would once have been okay on facebook. A fleeting laugh for passers-by. But it’s so cluttered in there now, so few opportunities to chat. So it was back here.

Of course, when I got here, I had an idea to move it to a different domain so that it could be linked still to my substack newsletter and so that I could finally use this domain name that I’ve been renewing for years without knowing what I was going to do with it. And of course that led to all sorts of malarkey, including around 24 hours where I could see that everything was still there hiding, I just couldn’t get to it.

So here I am. Writing nothing of consequence with no consequence. Because in a beautiful way the enshitiffation of it all is beautifully freeing. I don’t need to worry about SEO because what’s the point? Google is almost worthless as a search engine now. I don’t need to worry about whether people will unsubscribe because I’m not imposing on anyone’s time (or inbox). And I’ve just got this lovely, old-school blog theme where I don’t have to worry about blocks and formats and all the blah that takes so much brain for so little reason.

Of course, I know myself well enough to know that another ten months might pass without a visit. But for now, I shall enjoy the deeply satisfying feelings of ‘I’m home’ that coming back here always bring.